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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Eddy Frankel

Vile statues, writhing liquorice and kids marooned online: Edinburgh art festival review

Detail of Eva Rothschild's sculpture: tangled painted wires surround two dark, eye-shaped forms
Making connections … The Cloud, 2026, by Eva Rothschild. Photograph: Ruth Clark/courtesy the artist/Modern Art/The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

By the time you’re done with Edinburgh art festival you’ll have uncovered so many hidden stories you’ll feel like Columbo. We’re talking queer narratives, secret histories, undiscovered archives: the whole festival is a celebration of the underground and unheralded. You can’t walk into a gallery without learning about some subcultural genius or longlost creative you’ve never heard of. That’s not a bad MO for a city-wide art festival.

But EAF is also a big, unwieldy, confusing thing. There are curated displays, satellite exhibitions, performances, off-site projects, and it’s impossible to figure out how any of it fits together. You’ve just got to follow your nose and hope you sniff out something you like. And you’d better like photography, because there’s a lot of it here.

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